American Postmodernism

The first person I think of is Jael when I consider who the hero of The Female Man may be.  She seems to have overcome something in her transformation from “an old fashioned girl” to a “grown woman.”  She’s also a cyborg, which is something of an idea in “Manifesto for Cyborgs.”  However, her status as hero is problematic because I’m not sure that killing men is the way to resolve one’s issues with sexism or to regain one’s selfhood.  Jael isn’t a very realistic character.

Jeannine is another character who has undergone a similar transformation.  This transformation happens after Jael asks Jeannine if she’s ever killed a man.  Somehow this question leads to her becoming more self-possessed.  She begins to sleep in late and play with her food–two activities she felt guilty for wanting to do because she wanted to a “nice girl.”  She also decides not to marry Cal at the end of the novel and refuses her status as a mannequin.

I don’t think Janet changed very much throughout the book.  She is more of a static character than Jeannine.  Joanna is the character that is most difficult for me to analyze in terms of change or heroism.  Interestingly, the beginning of Part Nine begins with “This is the book of Joanna.”  It’s not clear whether this is Joanna the character or Joanna the author, but I assumed that the rest of Part Nine was narrated from Joanna’s perspective (which one, I don’t know).  At the end of Part Nine is this line:  “Remember, I didn’t and don’t want to be a ‘feminine’ version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version or an adapted version of the heroes I admire.  I want to be the heroes themselves” (206).  I don’t know if Joanna ever got to that point, but it’s significant that she wants it.

Jeannine, Jael, Janet, and Joanna (another ambiguous “I”) are described by “I” as Everywomen.  This is at first difficult to believe, which “I” admits–especially concerning Janet and Jael.  With Jael in particular, “I” says “Every woman is not Jael…but Jael is Everywoman” (212).  I’m not exactly sure what that means.  Perhaps it’s addressing the obvious issue that very few women, if any, are like Jael, but also asserting that there’s the possibility of Jael in every woman–just as there is the possibility of Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna in everywoman.  This goes back to the idea that femininity is multifaceted and conflicted among the population of women but also inside each woman.

If there is a hero in The Female Man, I would guess it might be Joanna, simply because she most often serves as an observer of the others and raises questions/challenges to the other characters. She questions Jeannine about her source of unhappiness, for example, and Jael about the necessity of killing the man in Manlander (although they all seem to question it). If there is an “everyman” (or, more accurately, an “everywoman”) in this novel, it seems to be Joanna, who is, not uncoincidentally the same name as the author. Through Joanna we get the various and most cogent “speeches” about the unfairness of (and the need to resist) the male world, male domination, male expectations. This is outlined particularly in the final section, the “Book of Joanna,” which has the most human-like “voice” of the novel. It also seems to be written more like a feminist essay than a novel.

One other possible “hero” of this novel is the novel itself. The last chapter seems to turn toward the role of the novel in expressing both the author’s views and those of all the characters, and gives a certain voice to the power of literary expression (I don’t think it’s very good in this novel, but that’s another issue). In a way, the novel “liberates” Russ and the broader feminine world that she speaks for by alllowing her to create characters and situations that are imagined but that express real-world frustrations, anger, etc.

Reading through the novel, obviously it’s hard to pick a “heroine” because the text itself seems so topsy-turvy (silly word).  However, if I had to pick one, I’d go with Jael.  She is the character who has taken her anti-masculine logic to an instinctive and combative level, and while I don’t think this hyper-oppositional stance is necessarily the best one, it is her efforts which ultimately bring together the other protagonists (spatially and, I think, ideologically), and allow them to understand their own failings or contradictions. And that is  the element of her that I find specifically heroic. I think she is heroic especially in the fact that this effort affects some change in super-passive Jeannine,  who seemed to be the one “thrown under the bus” and most change resistant throughout the whole narrative, frustrating the reader.

Additionally, I find her (Jael)  heroic because she is the one character who has essentially determined her own path.  Certainly, Jeannine hadn’t;  Joanne had to sacrifice her own identity to become a “man” in a man’s world; and Janet seems like more of a product of her strange utopia then a utopian ideal.  Also, we learn, or are lead to believe, that Jael’s hand in the struggle in her time created the later utopia.  As ambivalent as I am on this utopia (and the idea of utopias in general), the idea of self-sacrifice and risk to create an ideal society is certainly heroic.

[Edit: I just realized that that seemed vaguely like a ‘hurrah’ for genocide (sexocide?)… oops.]

That’s all that comes to mind, for now.

i think janet is the heroine of female man because of her reaction to jael accepting responsibility for there being no men in whileaway. even though the ‘utopia’ janet grew up in doesn’t even realize the idea of men, she still cries and feels grief for jael’s action. the question we must then ask is why? does she feel like in her paradise there is still something lacking that she could never put her finger on? (probably) does she regret that half of a species was wiped out because of radical beliefs that, in many ways resemble her own? (hopefully) does she feel responsible because of their similar genotype? (maybe) did she lean something about men that made their existence seen worthwhile? (who knows?)

she has just realized that the entirety of her existence and life as she knows is a result of nothing other than genocide–it’s much like the reactions of some americans when they learn about native americans and the founding of the country. for some reason she feels responsible for the actions in the past.she realizes her own inadequacies at comprehending what was so bad about men and why they were wiped out and how artificial her life is when it relies on technology and not biology.

in this sense she is a tragic hero and her flaw is being a woman feeling incomplete long after the absense of men should have abolished any form of suffering. jeannine is a tragic hero in the sense that she believes she is unable to escape the role society has laid out for her and joanna is a tragic hero in the sense that, after all her ranting and textualization and stereotyping, sh is left nowhere. sometimes she wants to fulfill gender roles but doesnt know if thats because she wants it, or if she wants it because she is told to want it. she can’t find true happiness with her husband just like she can’t find true happiness with laur because, in her eyes, the world is inherently flawed and since she is unable to fix the entire world, she also feels shes unable to fix her personal life because she feels it relies entirely on the external world.

I suppose I would call Jael the hero/anti-hero. Jael tells Janet the she was the plague that made Whileaway what it is, a world without men, and her world doesn’t seem so immoral or bad until she hears this news and feels guilt and grief for the way in which it became a world without men. This ending represented for me the way in which people think they know what an ideal world would be, and would like to go straight there without thinking about what kind of things would need to be done to get there. If we could only get a world where everyone considers everyone an equal and there is total peace, but we had to kill a whole race or gender to achieve that world first, would we still want it?

I guess I’ve always though of a hero as someone you root for, and I can’t say that these ladies give me a lot to root for.  Are they heroines in terms of what?  In defiance of The Man? Jael would win that one.  In terms of character growth?  Jeannine being more assertive, not needing to marry Cal, or going through with it so that we see it – maybe that is heroic.  But I would not go so far as to call any one of the four J’s a heroine.  And maybe the most heroic action comes on the part of Janet as they sit in the cafe, or diner, when she refuses to let Jael’s army put a base on Whileaway.  Janet doesn’t understand men, doesn’t have to deal with them, but it doesn’t mean she wants them eliminated.  There is potentially the type of green ray with a fifty-mile raduis that Jael’s world could bombard Whileaway with, but that possibility doesn’t hinder her decision.  (But I grew up Mennonite, so it figures that I applaude that.)

A case for any of The Female Man‘s characters to be defined as a hero is almost always refuted by the reality, history, or tradition of a different society in the novel.  Janet can be seen early on as the hero of the novel with her steadfast liberation from female restraints on both Jeannine and Joanna’s Earth.  When she fights the pompous Ginger ‘stache, despite Jeannine and Joanna’s concerns, most women, NAY! most readers, likely see her as a strong woman with strong convictions, and her actions motivated far more by the disrespect of the oaf and not a mere inclination toward violence.  But whereas she may be a hero on Earth, on Whileaway she is expendable, a stupid guinea thrown into an experiment where her safety is of least concern when compared with the will of scientific research.  Also, Jael picks up where Janet seems to fail, being a rich and influential person in her world, a powerful fighter, a remarkable genius, and also a compassionate other to the remaining three J’s.  But the revelation of her hand in the disease which exterminated men from Whileaway casts her into a darker light for all readers, both in knowing that Whileaway has turned out to be far from the Cockaigne (pun intended) Jael may have envisioned and also because she seems to kill men mostly out of pleasure–a terrifying prospect and a terrible reason for menocide.  Jeannine may not be a hero to anyone but Mr. Frosty, and Joanna cannot seem to hold her own against any of the women–even Jeannine, who she treats with a very unheroic contempt.  All women have some claim of a heroic stature, yet none of these arguments can be said to be watertight or comprehensive.  In a novel where futures and histories are all so hightly probable and somewhat continuous, the nature of each J must be held in account for these other realities, detrimentally so for them all.

I felt it was somewhat inevitable that these four women would eventually be revealed as one person, though all under different circumstances and whatnot as Jael apparently points out later in the book.  If nothing else, we are beginning to realize that our writer Joanna Russ is slowly making her presence felt as the ‘creator’ of these characters.  Understanding that Jeannine is also Joanna, in a different time and place, makes our discussion of how Joanna, Janet, and Ms. Russ feel about her more problematic.  We’ve all noted that she is the more obsequious character thus far, being manipulated by Cal.  Her compensatory, intense relationship with Mr. Frosty, her inner turmoil of her looks rooted in Cal’s perspective, and her willingness to attach herself to someone who will not commit to her future present a portrait of a woman submitted to an unfulfilling and subordinate life.

Keeping in mind that ‘these are all the same woman’, we are forced to assume Jael’s criteria primarily account for these women’s differences.  Janet may be the most deprived member of the group, but to my thinking, even as independent a woman as Janet and as fierce a woman as Jael would be overtaken by this male mentality in power during Jeannine’s elongated Depression.  The hostility we perceive in Joanna or Janet’s feelings toward Jeannine perhaps are more rooted in a knowledge of a woman’s limits, their frustrating susceptibility to the powers of someone else.  With the knowledge of a future’s fraility due to the probabilities and possibilities inherent in each atomic movement of each organism, how enfuriating it must be for those women to see a woman such as Jeannine allow herself to be so controlled and belittled because of the caprices of time?

It seems that Ms. Russ may intentionally diminishing a woman’s actual ability to progress from the social constraints of society.  If the possibilty or the power for success and equal identity is resigned to shfiting circumstance,  where is the ability to forge one’s own destiny, to make something of oneself?  I do not think Ms. Russ wants us to believe that only men decide a woman’s circumstance.  I doubt it was a decision of men to remove themselves from female companionship for too many obvious reason; women on Whileaway have been creating their own circumstance for thousands of years.  But does that not count as a default, with men not being an option?  I’ve yet to meet Jael, who exists in a quite separate reality with men, so we’ll see, but it seems to me that Ms. Russ would have strengthened her feminist stance by not taking men out of one equation, and having them the dominant ‘variable’ in the other two women’s lives.  Joanna would be most upset with Jeannine because Jeannine seems to have laid down an unfortunate path of subordination that Joanna, in the most recent future, is forced to travel.  This relationship points to a profound disappointment Joanna has with her precedents, her former self, her very self–but again, is it Jeaninne’s fault or the male hierarchy embodied in Cal which reduces her so?  The implication of these women all being the same women, varied by mere circumstance and not individual will (where’s the feminism in that?), strikes me as conflicted enough to shape most of the events later on, and whose importance in any later convergence will very likely experience some turbulence.  Vroom Vroom

Can it be considered a feminist book? I do think there is a certain amount of satire in the way Joanna Russ is writing this, which may be an attempt to produce some resistance to notions about women especially considering the date when it was written, but I’m not sure.  I mean, I still haven’t figured out what I really think about House of Leaves just because there was so much to it, but I’m hoping that the Female Man will be a little easier to tackle.

So on the drive home after class on Thursday I was listening to NPR, which makes me a nerd first of all, but also fairly up to speed on news I would like to think.  They had a story on “All Things Considered” about Margaret Chase Smith who was the first woman from a major political party to run for president.  (The first woman was actually Victoria (Clafin) Woodhull in 1872.)  It was strange to listen to this story about a woman running in 1964 for the Republican party (which I didn’t see coming), who was self described as hawkish, but as a part of her campaign for the presidency she had a theme song and talked about how her blueberry muffins would be far better than Kruschev’s.  The criticisms most commonly leveled against her was that as a woman she lacked the stamina to be president, or that her emotions would cloud her judgement, and in her speech to announce her bid for the presidency she addressed those ideas along with her other limitations.  It is kind of funny to listen to because she cites all these reasons that she shouldn’t run, and then says she’s going to do it anyway.  The story called attention to the fact that what helped her to relieve stress was vaccuuming.  Really?  Her bid was such a long shot that I don’t think it was paid a lot of attention to, but in the story it is evident that she had to struggle to remain tough enough, yet feminine.  Why are the two made into separate things?  It made me think about Hillary Clinton and a little bit about Sarah Palin, but I’ll save that for Tuesday.

Bringing it back to the novel though there seem to be these opposites, not polar, but very different in Janet and Jeannine.  One very meek while the other asserts herself, and I think for what we’ve talked about concerning Jael, she and Jeannine would be polar opposites.  As for Joanna’s place, I’m going to put her somewhere between Jeannine and Janet.  It’s cleaner that way.  So there is a scale of meekness to assertiveness, neither of which are portrayed positively.  Here’s where the satire comes in – there seems to be no character hits some sort of neutral point.  It’s either too much (Janet’s smugness) or too little (Jeannine’s whining).  No such thing as a good woman in this story I guess (but you can’t say much for the guys in the story either).  They don’t try to balance toughness and femininity and are portrayed negatively, but I don’t know if it is necessarily because of it.  I ultimately don’t think there is a balance and I wish people could just be without the striving, but that is what you see if you look at Margaret Chase Smith or Clinton or Palin – a strived for balance that is unattainable.

“I had got stuck with Jeannine,” writes the invisible narrator at the beginning of Part Five (83) of The Female Man.  Indeed, we readers may at times feel as though we are trapped with this odd character, reluctant voyeurs of an unhappy life. As Christina notes in this week’s post, it’s interesting that Jeannine seems to be the only character who does not speak in the first person.  What I also notice about Jeannine in Part Five and most notably Part Six of this novel is how she comes to dominate the narrative while her “voice” becomes increasingly erratic and unstable.  We have three pages 105-107 of detailed exposition of every motion and action that she takes in her apartment, for example, including inane efforts to “clean up,” sew, polish her shoes and pack (with excruciating detail) her suitcase.  It’s emblematic of her world of small things (like the lists that go on and on in White Noise) and small thoughts.

This is juxtaposed with more cynical digressions about female happiness (plastic women in a plastic world), from various versions of “When are you going to get married?” (113) to the “Great Happiness Contest” (116). The fact that Jeannine’s story takes up so much space, especially her rambling and contradictory self-talk that is increasingly depressive and cast against feminist sensibilities (“Do you want to be an airline pilot? Is that it?  And they won’t let you?”) is both interesting and exasperating.  The only conversation here, I think, is the one going on the author’s head, and it’s an angry one from the sound of it.  Well, it’s just SO 1970s, and I can say that, I’ve been there.  It was fresh for its time and well overdue, however, so I should not be too critical or impatient; heck, when I was in college for the first time there were more men than women enrolled.  Imagine that.

Still, The Female Man is not feminist utopian fiction, as Professor Sample assured us, so what is it? At first I liked the idea of further considering the “thought experiment” he mentioned that explores what happens if the author presents different versions of the same woman who SHOULD think and feel alike but do not. One could explore that with any identity group—women, ethnic minorities, teenage boys, born-again Christians, and so on—however, so that seems insufficient.  I want more.  I’m banking on reading more about Whileaway and the elusive utopia (or distopia) it may or may not represent.  If it all turns out to be simply a way to point the finger at men for our problems of dissension, aggression, and warmongering in the world, well, that’s still not very interesting or illuminating in 2008.  How about Maggie Thatcher and the Falklands War?  She was tough; they didn’t call her the Iron Lady for nothin’ (okay, if she was a man they wouldn’t call her Iron anything, they would just call her Prime Minister). Still, Jael has yet to come into the picture here in this novel, so I’m looking forward to being surprised.

A couple of things confused me when I first started reading The Female Man.  The most obvious thing is the fragmented narrative structure that only alludes to the identity of the speaker.  How does this relate to the subject matter?  Perhaps it has something to do with the many different notions of femininity.  Many modern women are in conflict with themselves over the different notions of femininity that exist today.  Section VI suggests that these parallel female worlds can all coexist due to the infinite number of possible universes that do not necessarily cancel each other out (6-7).

I also wondered why Jeannine lived in a world “that never saw the end of the Great Depression” (so says the back of the book).  Jeannine is the female character with the most archaic and stereotypical notions of womanhood.  She’s always worrying about her appearance, as in this day dream:

If I had the money, if I could get my hair done…She casts her eyes down, rich in feminine power.  Had my nails done today.  And these are good clothes, they have taste, my own individuality, my beauty (16).

What is the connection between her notions of gender and The Great Depression?  I think it has something to do her overall lack of money and her desire for a strong, capable man who can support her.  This is why she is so disparaging of Cal, her reporter boyfriend who she describes as always saying, “I’ll make it some day, baby” (3).  With all four female protagonists, the environment in which these women shape their individual notions of gender.

I also found it interesting that Jeannine’s character was narrated in the third person while Janet and Joanna both spoke in first person.  I think this has something to do with the fact that Jeannine’s self-image isn’t strong enough for her to be able to claim her voice.

I don’t believe any example of new media will ever seem that effective when the digital artists seem so willing to let their story suffer through any number of strange experimentation for the sake of something different.  The new media utilizing conversation, and J. Harris’ The Whale Hunt, certainly were impressive, but mostly for their uniqueness.  The new media which shuffled shifting shapes and boxes with broken lines of poetry, however, seemed visually fantastic, but disappointing for a reader–at least for those vocal members of our class and myself.  I find it difficult to imagine any new media which combines writing and a dizzying digital environment to great effect, without losing the stability I currently believe narrative forms require.

I say stability here with the greatest leniency.  Self-referential works, or narrative interjections, or when a writer sends a reader back and forth within the same book, or even disturbing the positioning of words on the page, seem interesting to me, but only insofar as they contribute to the meaning of the text and the enjoyment of the reader.  I remember approaching House of Leaves with a great foreboding  because I imagined that there was no way his story could be that great with that much experimentation.  But, as we’ve noted, he had enough to say and had enough control over the novel’s scope to not let it all go to his head, and lose us completely.  Those new media examples which based themselves around ‘true’ narratives, such as [theHouse] or Star Wars, One letter at a time, seemed to have lost their respect for a reader’s enjoyment.  I find some critics’ arguments that one cannot assume that a work of art is fractured to all readers well-founded, but I also agreed with David Lodge when he said that some writers or artists take the ‘presentational’ approach to far and alienate the average reader.  These new media texts appear to assume that their very opaque meanings will mean something to somebody; that this same fractured design I’ve noted means more than it might otherwise.

What I would really appreciate is a new media approach to a narrative that doesn’t seek to disorient a reader, but that supplements his reading with interesting, interactive choices to shift the work.  This may sound like it contradicts my earlier point that some stability is necessary for an effective piece of literature, but I think that when the interaction of the digital text does not impede the flow and the arc of the story–and instead presents it as mellifluous or reactive with the drama intact–, the reader stands a chance at constructive interpretation, not merely befuddled and soporific musings on why the author doesn’t want us to get through two consecutive lines of her poetry.

My boyfriend was in the room with me as I viewed the new media texts on my laptop, and I bitched to him that I had signed up to be a literature major because I wanted to read books.  We both had a good time making fun of this stuff, but then he asked me in all seriousness, “So how IS this supposed to be literature?”  A serious question deserved a serious answer.  I responded then that these texts were new ways of presenting a narrative, to get us to think about narratives in different ways.

Now that we talked in class about these texts, I want to refine my answer, but I’m not yet sure how.  For one thing, some of these texts don’t have anything to do with narratives.  There is no traditional story in Nelson’s “Conversation” (Conversation?  What’s the MLA format for new media texts?).  Some of these new media texts don’t even emphasize text.  Harris’s “The Whale Hunt,” for example, relies on full-screen, high quality photographs to reveal the chronological events (we might even argue that it’s a story) of the whale hunt.  Brief captions are available, but they are not a prominent part of the experience.

So if these new media texts don’t necessarily involve stories or rely on text, how can we justify talking about them in a literature class?  I think we need to think about new media in broader terms, to analyze these new media texts as art pieces that don’t quite fit into the categories we already have (visual art, music, literature, etc.).  For example, one of the articles we read in Pomo CoNo mentioned John Cage’s piece, “4’33,” which involves a conductor, an orchestra, an audience, and complete silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.  We can’t accurately describe this as music, but we can consider it an interesting art piece that experiments with sound.  Then there’s Marcel DuChamp’s “Fountain,” a piece of installation art involving a urinal, which Marcel displayed and signed “R. Mutt.”  Neither of these pieces requires much “artistic skill” or even effort, but both demonstrate the kind of innovative thinking that the art world thrives on.  These pieces force us to ask and attempt to answer the questions:  What counts as art, and why?

I have to remind myself that we once rejected the novel and impressionistic paintings, and now we take it for granted that they are legitimate art forms.  Maybe the same will happen with new media texts in the years ahead.